Google’s Take on the Future of Fintech: Beyond Neobanks and BNPL

In their latest conversation, Karen Zhang from Google says the big consumer fintech waves of the last few years, such as neobanks and buy now, pay later, is starting to feel crowded. There are now lots of similar B2C fintech products, which makes it harder for companies stand out and scale and while Google isn’t saying these models are finished, but that they’ve become oversaturated, so the next opportunities are showing up elsewhere.

Google explains that momentum is shifting from B2C to B2B fintech, from building consumer-focused apps to building the infrastructure that powers financial services at scale. Many neobanks created robust tech behind the scenes, like custom core systems and ledgers (the systems that record balances and transactions). Now, more fintechs are packaging parts of that stack and offering them to other organisations instead of keeping them in-house.

That’s where white labelling and banking-as-a-service (BaaS) come in; White labelling is “we built it, you brand it,” while BaaS is the broader idea of providing modular banking components, such as accounts, payments, ledgering, cards, and compliance tooling, via platforms and APIs; With Google saying that much of their time is now spent with fintechs that have shifted to serving tier 1, tier 2, and tier 3 banks, as well as insurers.

For Zhang, the exciting part is how this changes the conversation from “interesting technology” to “how do we actually scale?” with distribution often being the hardest piece. In the UK, Zhang notes fintech can be fragmented, there’s a fintech for every product — which can keep companies stuck in narrow lanes; Whereas  B2B approach helps fintechs reach millions of end users indirectly by embedding capabilities inside established providers that already have big customer bases.

Overall, Zhang frames this as embedded finance with a B2B focus: fintechs supply the components, and banks or insurers bring reach, trust, and existing relationships and Google expects more of this with more collaboration across the fintech ecosystem, and more fintechs choosing to be the reliable beating heart of banking rather than the flashy consumer front end.